In all likelihood, Whittlesey probably suffered from what would now be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He was, according to friends, haunted by nightmares and memories of the soldiers who had died under his command. The grief of others may have magnified his own. At funerals and hospitals, soldiers’ families looked to Whittlesey, the war hero, for consolation, and widows often beseeched him for financial help. Indeed, at Whittlesey’s own memorial service, Judge Charles Hibbard, a family friend, stated in his eulogy that such emotional labor, on top of the trauma he had experienced in war, became “a never ceasing and most exhausting drain upon his sympathy.”
Thus, when he accepted the invitation to participate in the Unknown Soldier’s funeral on November 11, 1921, Whittlesey—recently promoted to colonel in the reserve division of the 108th Regiment—was, by all accounts, in poor health both mentally and physically. In addition to post-traumatic stress, the war had left him with a chronic cough, possibly the result of gas-related tuberculosis. Friends and relatives later described him as appearing sickly and moody, and participating in the Unknown Soldier’s funeral seemed only to worsen his spirits. When Whittlesey booked passage on the Toloa, he apparently told no one except his housekeeper, informing her only that he would be away for a few days.
Whittlesey’s suicide made national headlines. Some 3,000 mourners attended his memorial service, held on December 11, 1921 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. In his eulogy, Judge Hibbard focused not on Whittlesey’s battlefield heroism, but on his empathy and sensitivity—qualities that enabled him to comfort others who had lost loved ones in the war, yet also caused him unendurable anguish. “He had plumbed the depth of tragic suffering,” Hibbard stated. While he had survived the Lost Battalion’s ordeal, Whittlesey still died as a casualty of war, “‘[w]ounded in action,’ aye, sorely wounded in heart and soul and now most truly ‘missing in action,’” as Hibbard said in his eulogy.
The tragic story of Colonel Charles Whittlesey prompts a more expansive understanding of the losses that the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier commemorates. In 1999, after the exhumation and identification of the Vietnam War Unknown, the Tomb was rededicated to honor missing as well as unidentified service members from the Vietnam War; it is now understood to honor missing service members from all U.S. wars. Whittlesey, too, remains “missing,” in the sense that his body was never recovered from the sea. While he did not die in a war, he can certainly be mourned as a casualty of war—as can the thousands of other veterans who have died by suicide, many of whom are buried at Arlington. These losses, too, can be remembered at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.